A Case Study: Blockchain as Disruptive Innovation in Healthcare

This case study argues that growing prominence of Blockchain represents disruptive innovation. It fundamentally changes the organisation and functions of the healthcare industry, representing a new mechanism for clinical practice, revenue generation, research and realising patient-centered care. By merging different industries, it is able to fulfil customers’ and business’s needs that were previously unattainable through technologies before it. Thus, it is an example of new market disruptive innovation because it creates new market segments to reach an underserved customer base whilst transforming an expensive and unattainable product to one that is more affordable and accessible to a larger population.

The healthcare industry’s efforts to shift from the use of paper-based health records to digital health records has been a disjointed and complicated process, met with significant challenges to system-wide interoperability, security and privacy concerns (Jaiswal, Misra, & Misra, 2023). Blockchain technology has emerged in the last decade as new market disruptive innovation in the field of Information Communication and Computation Technology (ICCT) (Wadhwa & Gupta, 2020). Its innovative capacity in the finance industry has resulted in new mechanisms to generate revenue, improve process performance and enhance end-user’s experiences (Reddy & Aithal, 2020). This has catalysed scholars and practitioners in the healthcare industry explore its potential utility as an alternative means to digitise health records among other uses as depicted in Figure 1 (Reddy & Aithal, 2020).

Figure 1: The potential uses of blockchain in the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) |Extracted from Wadhwa, S., & Gupta, D. (2020). Blockchain Revolution: Using Distributed Ledger Technology to Transform Healthcare in WSN-IoT Environment.

The Health Record Management System (HRMS) project has applied this disruptive technology as a form of new market innovation (Ekblaw et al., 2016). This project’s use of blockchain demonstrates new market innovation because it addresses the challenges of data breaches and manipulation, and the low degree of interoperability in the healthcare industry’s drive for digitised health records. This presents a new market segment and customer base that could not be filled by the existing plethora of Health Information System (HIS) vendors and software (Ekblaw et al., 2016). Additionally, the HRMS is orientated to individual patients rather than hospitals and healthcare providers. This explicitly shows the creation of a new customer base that did not exist before this technology. This also enables new opportunities of patient agency in their interaction with health systems, realising new degrees of participation and trust, and potentially revenue generating mechanisms (Ekblaw et al., 2016).

MedRec is another new market player in this space, mostly geared for the sharing of electronic health records (EHR) between healthcare providers. This technology can replace common HIS through its capacity to address fragmentation, slow access to medical data and system interoperability (Ekblaw et al., 2016). MedRec achieves this by aggregating a patient’s interactions with multiple healthcare providers to a single point of reference that is constantly updated. Additionally, it enables new paths for medical and public health researchers to access and analyse data from multiple sources. Compared to relying on data from clinical studies, national census and academic hospitals, MedRec’s use of blockchain allows the health industry to shift from an expensive and unattainable means to access data to one that is more affordable and accessible to a larger group of market players (Ekblaw et al., 2016).

Furthermore, the emergence of blockchain enables functionalities that were not possible before this innovation, such as deep learning or predictive modelling. The unstructured, fragmented and poor quality of health data present in existing EHRs does not lend itself to be utilised for estimating clinical outcomes (Rokade & Mishra, 2024). Blockchain’s ability to provide significantly more complete data represents a transformational shift of “medical data into actionable information” that is boundless in its implementation (Rokade & Mishra, 2024).

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References

Ekblaw, A., Azaria, A., Halamka, J. D., & Lippman, A. (2016). A Case Study for Blockchain in Healthcare:“MedRec” prototype for electronic health records and medical research data. Proceedings of IEEE open & big data conference.

Jaiswal, H., Misra, A., & Misra, P. K. (2023). Health Record Management System Using Block chain Technologies.

Reddy, B., & Aithal, P. (2020). Blockchain as a disruptive technology in healthcare and financial services-A review based analysis on current implementations.

Rokade, S., & Mishra, N. (2024, 27-29 Jan. 2024). Intelligent Health: Empowering Illness and Prognosis with Machine Learning-Enabled Electronic Health Records on Blockchain. 2024 International Conference on Advancements in Smart, Secure and Intelligent Computing (ASSIC).

Wadhwa, S., & Gupta, D. (2020). Blockchain Revolution: Using Distributed Ledger Technology to Transform Healthcare in WSN-IoT Environment. In Emerging Technologies and the Application of WSN and IoT (pp. 112-128). CRC Press.